El Paso (USA) (AFP)
Hundreds of anonymous people attended the funeral of a woman whose death in the El Paso shootings two weeks ago in Texas left her husband in a loneliness that deeply moved the Americans.
"It's incredible," said Antonio Basco, crying, as he hugged the many strangers who came to offer him their condolences Friday night, in front of his wife's flower-covered coffin.
When Margie Reckard was shot by the shooter who shot 22 people in a supermarket in El Paso on August 3, her 61-year-old husband thought he should bury her alone.
Married for over twenty years, the bereaved husband has "no other family" to assist him in this mourning and had asked the funeral home to invite "everyone" to attend the funeral of his wife.
"I do not know what she found in me (but) we had wonderful years together, the best years of my life," he told CNN.
Message received: some 10.0000 words of condolence and more than 900 bouquets and wreaths were sent, some from Asia, according to the New York Times.
And Friday night, about 700 people waited in full heat, in a tail running down the street, to present their tributes.
Faced with the avalanche of support, the ceremony was moved to a place more spacious than originally planned.
A group of mariachis punctuated the ceremony to the sound of Mexican songs.
While some anonymous people had come from afar to attend the ceremony, many were residents of El Paso still traumatized by the deadly shootings.
Rising on the banks of the Rio Grande, on the border with Mexico, the city has 680,000 inhabitants, 83% of whom are Hispanic.
El Paso's shooter, a 21-year-old white man, admitted to police custody that he wanted to attack "Mexicans".
© 2019 AFP